Riverside House of Horrors: Foster Family Who Took in Turpin Girls is Accused of Abusing Them

Table Of Content

• Turpin sisters describe life in house of horrors: ‘There was a lot of starving’
• House of Horror Survivor Jordan Turpin Debuts New Romance With Boyfriend Matt Ryan
• Jordan Turpin details making 911 call moments after she escaped family's 'house of horrors'
• more from the turpin family
• Chain with 1,704 locations confirms store's last day more closures loom
• Frank Sinatra's former NYC townhouse lists for the first time in more than 50 years

Riverside County District Attorney Mike Hestrin said the abuse began as neglect during the 17 years the family lived in Fort Worth, Texas, and intensified when they moved to California in 2010. The Turpin girls were told that if they did not comply with the defendants' demands, they would not be able to see their older siblings again, court papers allege. It alleges that Marcelino Olguin fixed his attention on the sisters, while another girl, identified only by the initials "J.P.,'' was physically abused by the defendants, but not sexually assaulted. Van Wagenen also outlined several of his office's "efforts to progressively transform the county's child welfare and dependent adult systems," which include improved training and auditing protocols.

Turpin sisters describe life in house of horrors: ‘There was a lot of starving’

She’s charged with accessory after the fact, felony eluding police and obstruction of justice. Police told us both victims were taken to the hospital and are in stable condition. "Maybe a kid someday, a nice car. Graduating college, being a book writer, or a motivational speaker," she said. "When I have kids, I want to make sure I'm in a good place. I have a good job because I wanna give my kids the best life ever."

Turpin kids endured 'worse' treatment in foster care after rescue from parents' 'house of horrors': lawyer - New York Post

Turpin kids endured 'worse' treatment in foster care after rescue from parents' 'house of horrors': lawyer.

Posted: Wed, 24 Jan 2024 08:00:00 GMT [source]

House of Horror Survivor Jordan Turpin Debuts New Romance With Boyfriend Matt Ryan

"And I contacted my attorney, Jack Osborn, and he refused to let me know who was over charge of my trust." Recent court filings show the court-appointed public guardian failed to file the annual accounting for the trust, leaving the family's finances opaque. "You rarely hear folks like you speaking out publicly about your work. This is the exception," ABC News correspondent David Scott told Donaldson as she explained what the last four years have been like for the Turpin children. But advocates and several of the Turpins themselves have come forward to share troubling tales of their plight.

Jordan Turpin details making 911 call moments after she escaped family's 'house of horrors'

In an interview with ABC News, prosecutor Michael Hestrin said that “hundreds of journals” were recovered from the children’s home — material he thinks will likely be able to document what was happening inside the house in real time. Among other behaviors, Hestrin said the Turpins, including parents and children, slept all day and were “up all through the night,” going to bed about 4 or 5 a.m. That is how a California prosecutor characterized the abuse David and Louise inflicted on their 13 children over a period of at least seven years — torture, the prosecutor said, that included beatings, starvation and strangulation. “They have undergone a horrible period in their life,” said Mark Uffer, chief executive officer of Corona Regional Medical Center, where the seven adult Turpin children were being treated. But Kent Ripley, the entertainer who performed as Elvis for the family, said he saw nothing to indicate any abuse of the children or tension between them and their parents. A neighbor of the family told PEOPLE the parents and children exhibited “odd” behaviors.

more from the turpin family

But a judge admonished the couple, saying any success the siblings achieved would be in spite of, not because of, their parents. Judge Bernard Schwartz called the couple's actions "selfish, cruel, and inhumane." "It stopped me dead in my tracks," said Riverside District Attorney Mike Hestrin. He and other officials told Sawyer and ABC News correspondent David Scott about the shocking challenges the Turpin children have faced since their rescue. The couple's youngest child was the only one who appeared to have not been abused.

Chain with 1,704 locations confirms store's last day more closures loom

Deputies testified that the children said they were only allowed to shower once a year. They were mainly kept in their rooms except for meals, which had been reduced to one per day, a combination of lunch and dinner. Some of the children, who were not filmed, described still struggling with moving on from the plight, but expressed joy at being able to live new lives and attend school. Some of the children were bound to their beds and furniture by chains and padlocks and many of them told police they were "starving," according to the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department.

Sunday morning, Lynchburg Police officers responded to 2137 Wards Road in reference to a large fight. As officers were in route, 911 calls came in about shots being fired during the incident. Once officers arrived, they found two victims with gunshot wounds, one was a 74-year-old and the other was a 30-year-old. In the video attached to this article, 10 News reporter Kelly Marsh shows a Facebook live from one of the victims where the man shows his gunshot wound. We want to warn you that some of the images and video footage you see may be graphic for some viewers.

Frank Sinatra's former NYC townhouse lists for the first time in more than 50 years

Jennifer Turpin Shares Details About Fall Wedding: 'The Best Thing Ever' - PEOPLE

Jennifer Turpin Shares Details About Fall Wedding: 'The Best Thing Ever'.

Posted: Wed, 17 Apr 2024 07:00:00 GMT [source]

David and Louise Turpin pleaded guilty to 14 felony counts in 2019 and were sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole. The seven adult children were living together and attending school in February when their parents pleaded guilty. Attorney Jack Osborn, who represents them, declined to comment Thursday. Responding officers initially thought the girl was a child because she was so emaciated, according to the investigators.

The badly abused siblings, aged 2 to 29, were taken to a hospital, where they received food and emotional support. When police first approached the house, after Jordan, then just a 17-year-old girl, made the life-changing phone call to authorities in 2018, loads of trash filled the rooms, urine and feces were smeared against the walls and moldy food was observed. We are taking the time to make sure our staff is ok and offering them options on how to cope and get through this. Police rushed all 13 children to the hospital, where they were treated, given clean clothes, rooms and food. The first thing Jordan said she ate was macaroni and cheese and chicken nuggets.

Jennifer recalled one moment when she said her father picked her up, feet off the floor, and slammed her into a wall. When Jennifer, the eldest Turpin child, was an infant, she said she and her parents lived in a nice neighborhood in Fort Worth, Texas. Her father worked as an electrical engineer and her mother was a homemaker. Both were originally from West Virginia and grew up as devout members of the same conservative pentecostal church. Her siblings were distressed by their mother’s behavior, which prompted Jordan to make her call earlier than she planned.

While the Turpin House of Horrors is in reference to the California house, the oldest Turpin child, Jennifer, 33, revealed that the abuse began in Texas. "The county has oversight over ChildNet. In fact they are required to check in with these children that the county placed with ChildNet," Zektser added. The children were forced to sleep during the day and and stay away from the windows at night as to not draw suspicion from their suburban neighbors. Jennifer Turpin, the eldest of the siblings, recounted during the interview with famed TV journalist Diane Sawyer how she was pulled out of school in the third grade, and enrolled with her siblings in a sham home school that listed their dad as principal. The dispatcher tracked Turpin's location from the GPS on her cell phone, and the call lasted about 22 minutes before a deputy arrived at her location. In less than two hours after Turpin placed the call, her parents were in handcuffs.

She said some of the children would try to “steal” food and their parents would beat them or chain them up for it. When rescued, all of the children except for the youngest, a toddler, were severely malnourished, prosecutors said. The 17-year-old had only been outside a few times in her entire life and she was terrified. Her hands were shaking uncontrollably as she held a deactivated cell phone her parents didn’t know she had, but thinking of her siblings chained up inside the house, she worked up the courage to dial 911. The Turpin siblings were rescued from their parents' home in January 2018 after Jordan Turpin, then 17, executed a daring escape in the middle of the night and called 911.

When police entered the house — which became known as the "house of horrors — they found children ranging in age from 2 to 29 being held in "dark and foul-smelling surroundings," investigators said. As the adult children struggled under county guardianship, some of their seven younger siblings faced new hardships in the foster care system and the California-based agency contracted to run it by the county. "I don't really have a way to get food right now," Jordan Turpin, 21, told ABC News' Diane Sawyer when they met in July. At the time, Jordan had just been released -- she says without warning -- from extended foster care with no plan for food, health care, life skills training, or even shelter. 13 children were held captive by their parents in a survival story like you’ve never seen.

Their monstrous parents each pleaded guilty to 14 counts of torture, false imprisonment and related charges in February 2019, and were later sentenced to 25 years to life in prison. After their rescue, some of the younger siblings spent years in foster homes where there were accusations of child abuse -- including an accusation that at least one of the Turpins was a victim of such abuse, for which charges have been filed. Two of the older children have at times had to resort to "couch-surfing," one advocate said, and, in at least one case, another was assaulted. As Riverside's district attorney, it was Hestrin who prosecuted the Turpins' parents, David and Louise. They are now serving life sentences in separate California penitentiaries. David and Louise Turpin pleaded guilty to 14 felony counts of torture, false imprisonment and related charges in February 2019 and were later sentenced to 25 years to life in prison.

In 2022, she settled into her own apartment in Southern California and told PEOPLE that she remained "very close" to her siblings. “They have been victimized again by the system,” Mike Hestrin, the Riverside County district attorney who prosecuted David and Louise Turpin, told ABC. In a heartbreaking first interview, two of the 13 Turpin siblings opened up about the abuse they faced at the hands of their own parents in one Perris, Calif., home. Anyone with information is asked to contact the Lynchburg police department.

Last summer she gave her first interview to Diane Sawyer for ABC News. "I wasn't doing well," Jordan — who was joined by her older sister Jennifer — says now of that time. "But I felt we weren't the only ones being treated wrong in the system — and I wanted to help my siblings." Even as she suffered in foster care, Jordan — who taught herself basic math, reading and writing in captivity — found joy in schoolwork. Yet, Jordan and five of her siblings say their nightmare continued when they were placed in an abusive foster home.